Raschke - Force of God : political theology and the crisis of liberal democracy

FORCE OF GOD

Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

INSURRECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE

Slavoj iek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey W. Robbins, editors

The intersection of religion, politics, and culture is one of the most discussed areas in theory today. It also has the deepest and most wide-ranging impact on the world. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture will bring the tools of philosophy and critical theory to the political implications of the religious turn. The series will address a range of religious traditions and political viewpoints in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. Without advocating any specific religious or theological stance, the series aims nonetheless to be faithful to the radical emancipatory potential of religion.

Force of God

Political Theology and the
Crisis of Liberal Democracy

CARL A. RASCHKE

Columbia University Press New York

TO MY ENTIRE FAMILY:

Contents

In 1922 Carl Schmitt wrote that the metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization. What Schmitt did not say is that often crisis arises because the metaphysical structureGilles Deleuzes image of thoughtis no longer in alignment with the political form. Jacques Derrida perhaps intended something similar when in Specters of Marx he introduced the concept of the messianic in the context of his diagnosis of the present time, what Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote that time is out of joint. Our time is out of joint because the principal political form on which Derrida began to meditate with the fall of Communismi.e., democracyis increasingly dislodged from its own metaphysical structure. This metaphysical structure was forged through various historical circumstances from the seventeenth through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a metaphysical structure we know simply and perhaps too uncritically as modernism. The political form is what we know as liberal democracy.

As we slide onward into the newborn millennium and become increasingly cognizant that both the present and the future will be in many ways vastly different from the previous century, the daily headlines as well as a distinct but cloying feeling for the disjointedness of the times reinforce an unprecedented sense of reality. It is quite obvious that liberal democracy as we know it is in crisis. Since the end of the totalitarian era, most dramatically symbolized in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many new democracies have come and disappeared with a disturbing rhythm. at the same time, the Western democracies, both in america and in Europe, have descended into profound crises of historically unique proportions. Deepening political dysfunctions are exacerbated by economic challenges that have grown overwhelming for a variety of reasons. The sources of this crisis are multilayered: unsustainable demands on the capacity of governments to provide for the general welfare while maintaining its tax base; insatiable consumerist fantasies combined with an epidemic of narcissistic personality pathologies propagated by the substitution of pure signs for useful commodities (Jean Baudrillards so-called hyperreality), which can best be described in Fredric Jamesons phrase the logic of lateglobalcapitalism; an explosion of ethnic and cultural identitarian politics as well as resurgent types of religious exceptionalism and zealotry that go hand in hand with the slow but steady collapse of the institutions of civil society and authority of the nation-state that, from a generic standpoint, underpins liberal democracy; what Olivier Roy has termed the de-culturing of worldwide religious belief, leading to the divorce of faith from politics and the many metastasized manifestations of what Mark lilla terms the great separation, including religious fanaticism and terrorism as well as the sort of smarmy, kitschy, mindless, pseudo-intellectual, and slyly bigoted brand of unbelief expressed in the movement known as the new atheists.

The crisis remains imperceptible only to the most wizened ideologues and those who are historically and culturally trend-deaf. Normally the response, which reflects our own sordid and self-referential subcultural (what we mistakenly describe as partisan) politics, is to find, assign, and embroider the countless constructs for blame. as Nietzsche himself diagnosed, generalized social ressentiment cannot be disentangled from an addiction to causal explanations. In the age of the social sciences with their exhaustless capacity to single out problems, victims, and therapeutic or policy remedies, such ressentiment goes viral and the engines driving it become a juggernaut.

Scientific causal analysis failed most theatrically with the global economic meltdown of 2008, a failure that in many ways can traced to a certain deficit in the professional disciplines themselves, which many contemporary theorists have lamented for well over a generation. aside from the great separation of the political from the religious, a more telling rupture has been the separation of political theory from economic thinkingin short, the default of what was once known as political economy. It can be said that Karl Marxor at least the Marx of the 1830s and 1840swas the last great political economist in the omnibus sense, and it is the raw economism and intellectual dogmatism of later, orthodox Marxism-Leninism, from which the subtleties of communal interaction along with the inscription of social life within some sort of wider, far more nuanced, ontological matrix are completely absent, that commentators have only surmised as the leading factor in the elaboration of its darker totalitarian legacy as well as in its eventual historical demise. a more supple and genuinely humanized Marxism could easily have provided a warning of the economic disaster of 2008. The question of capital is not at all dead, and it will take a bona fide political economy of the future to chart its vicissitudes and anticipate its crises to come.

But the default of political economy, particularly in the twentieth century, has had hitherto undetected side consequences that go a long way toward accounting for the crisis of liberal democracy in the main. In the forthcoming pages we shall explore at length the nature, indications, and social-theoretical intricacies of the default by seeking to conduct, la Nietzsche and Foucault among others, a